Breaking news reporting

In a clip that accompanies the DVD release of “Citizen Hearst,” Houston Chronicle Executive Editor and Executive Vice President Jeff Cohen introduces Sylvia Wood, who was at the time an editor on the Hearst-owned paper’s breaking-news “Go Team” (she left the paper in September and now works for the Houston Independent School District). “Our goal every day is to be fast, first and accurate,” Wood says in the clip, which was filmed last summer, describing her work:

We look at the TV broadcasts, we look at the TV websites. We’re looking at Twitter. Often AP is behind the game when it comes to breaking news; we can get it faster from a lot of other sources. So besides covering the news landscape we’re also looking at what kinds of stories people are talking about.

The opportunity for it to deliver remarkable images is made clear on an almost-daily basis, be it in the midst of a crisis like the Boston Marathon bombings, Hurricane Sandy, or simply someone snapping a notable shot at a local event.

The risk is that images are easily faked, scraped and manipulated.

News organizations and others seeking to source images and information from the crowd therefore have no choice but to push forward with new methods of verification — and to make existing methods quicker and more accurate. So it’s no surprise that we’re seeing initial moves towards automating aspects of the verification process.

The Guardian and Scoopshot both recently unveiled new initiatives to bring an element of automation to verification. Read more

Journalists are often warned about the perils of getting emotionally involved with stories and subjects, but when reporting on a tragedy there’s always room to act as a human being first and a reporter second.

Reporting on the pain of the small college town of Blacksburg, Va., after the horrific 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, my natural instinct was to grieve with the folks there. At the time, though, I didn’t know how to use my emotions as a compass to help me connect with people I needed to interview.

But six years later, I know that for journalists in such terrible situations our humanity is a strength, not a weakness.

Terrible events such as yesterday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon have always meant “all hands on deck” for news organizations, with staffers pulled off their regular beats to contribute.

But the endpoint of the newsgathering and reporting is no longer a front-page package of stories explaining — the best one can — what happened, why it happened and what might be next. Now, there is no endpoint — events are reported in real time, with stories in constant motion, and the front page is a snapshot of an organization’s reporting at the moment when the presses needed to roll.

Boston was a reminder of that, and a look at what’s changing in real-time journalism. Through Twitter and various live blogs, I found myself looking over my shoulder at the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Reuters and other news organizations, and was able to make some observations and draw some conclusions. Read more

California manhunt subject Christopher Dorner may or may not be dead: Forensics investigators will look at the teeth and make chest X-rays of the charred corpse found in a rental cabin where police say the former Los Angeles police officer holed up and exchanged gunfire with cops.

When Americans first learn about a breaking news story, 83 percent seek out a second source to get more information, new research says.

Half of them turned to a different type of platform (i.e., heard the news on TV then went online to read more) for follow-up, and of the people who went online, 60 percent turned to a traditional news outlet like The New York Times, CNN or Fox News.

Traditional news outlets beat out Web-native sites like HuffPost, social media and search as the second online source to follow up on big news.

In an interview with the Times, NPPA lawyer Mickey Osterreicher says “the war on terrorism has somehow morphed into an assault on photography,” both by the press and the general public.

“Literally every day, someone is being arrested for doing nothing more than taking a photograph in a public place. It makes no sense to me. Photography is an expression of free speech,” Osterreicher says. Read more

Cubs President Theo Epstein weighed in Wednesday on the controversy leading up to the trade of popular pitcher Ryan Dempster, saying one factor in the nine-day drama was how quickly news spread through social media.

They should have held off reporting the supposed connections to the tea party or the Democratic Party until they had more than just a lead. In the same way, I think this was the wrong time for journalists to tweet their attempts to confirm those reports. In short, it was the wrong time for process journalism.

I use Edward Champion, managing editor of a culture site called Reluctant Habits, to illustrate a practice that did little to inform and had the potential to misinform.

The common denominator here — aside from a willingness to throw out unsubstantiated claims during a high-stakes, breaking news story — is that both outlets tried to chase down a fairly common name in the hopes of finding something revealing about the shooter. Read more